Talent Marketplace

The Talent Marketplace is a connected experience that helps employees understand their skills, grow through learning, and explore career opportunities across Vanderbilt, all in one place.

It brings together your Talent Profile, learning and development in Grow, the Learning Hub, and the Opportunity Marketplace to make growth more visible, intentional, and accessible. Instead of focusing only on your current role, the Talent Marketplace highlights what you can do, what you’re building, and where those skills can take you next.

Talent marketplace explanation graphic

Learn more by taking our Introduction to the Talent Marketplace course

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Our Objectives

The Talent Marketplace is designed to empower employees to take ownership of their growth while helping Vanderbilt better understand, develop, and deploy its talent. Its core objectives are to:

Make skills visible and actionable
Create a shared, skills-based understanding of talent by bringing together profiles, learning, and career opportunities in one connected ecosystem.
Support continuous growth and development
Enable employees to see where they are today, understand what skills they are building, and take intentional steps toward future opportunities.
Connect learning to real capability
Ensure learning is purposeful by clearly linking courses and development experiences to skill awareness, progression, and application over time.
Increase career transparency and access
Provide visibility into career roles, pathways, and opportunities across Vanderbilt so employees can explore what’s possible and plan with clarity.
Enable meaningful development conversations
Create a shared foundation for employees and managers to discuss growth, readiness, and next steps using a common language around skills and aspirations.
Strengthen internal mobility and opportunity
Help connect people to roles, projects, and experiences aligned to their skills and interests, supporting talent movement based on capability, not just position.

Our Philosophy

The Talent Marketplace is built on the belief that growth is continuous, skills are dynamic, and careers are not linear.

We believe employees thrive when they can clearly see their skills, understand how those skills grow through learning and experience, and explore opportunities that align with their interests and aspirations. Development should be intentional, visible, and accessible, without requiring employees to navigate disconnected systems or guess what comes next.

The Talent Marketplace shifts the focus from roles to skills, from static snapshots to evolving capability, and from limited career paths to transparent opportunity. It is not about checking boxes or racing to mastery, but about helping people build a strong foundation, gain confidence, and move forward with purpose over time.

Our Guiding Principles

Skills-first, not role-first
Skills are the common language that connects learning, development, and opportunity. Roles may change, but skills travel and grow over time.
Growth is continuous and evolving
Talent Profiles and development journeys are living reflections of progress, not fixed assessments. Growth is measured over time, not at a single point.
Learning builds foundations
Learning creates awareness and shared understanding. Mastery comes through experience, application, and continued development.
Transparency enables opportunity
When career roles, pathways, and expectations are visible, employees can make informed, realistic, and intentional decisions about their growth.

Features

Talent Profile
Your Talent Profile is a structured record of your professional information within the Talent Marketplace. It captures who you are, what you bring, and what you’re working toward—based on information you maintain and update.
The Talent Profile includes:
- Career statement – a short summary of your professional focus and interests
- Skills and qualifications – skills you’ve added and are developing
- Licenses and certifications – credentials you’ve earned
- Degrees and education – academic background
- Languages – languages you speak
- Career preferences – job function, job family, and timing of a next move
- Previous employment – work history
- Skill Center – skills you’ve attained or are developing
- Attachments – supporting documents, such as resumes
The Talent Profile does not recommend roles or automatically manage career movement. Instead, it serves as a central source of truth for your skills, experience, and preferences—supporting learning, development conversations, and visibility across the Talent Marketplace.
Keeping your Talent Profile up to date ensures your information is accurate, current, and ready to support future learning and opportunity alignment.
Grow
Grow is where learning, skills, careers of interest, and connections come together. It helps you explore what you want to learn, what skills you want to build, and who you can connect with—without managing career movement.
In Grow, you can:
- Explore and follow skills
- Explore careers of interest
- Find and enroll in learning
- Build learning journeys
- Connect with people across the organization
Grow supports intentional learning and development by organizing learning around skills and interests in one place.
Opportunity Marketplace & Career Roles
The Opportunity Marketplace is where you explore career roles and understand the pathways between roles. It helps you see what skills are commonly required for different roles and what development resources can support readiness over time.
In the Opportunity Marketplace, you can:
- Explore career roles and paths
- See the skills associated with each role
- Identify development resources that support skill building
- Understand how skills and learning connect to career progression
The Opportunity Marketplace supports career awareness and preparation. It does not manage job applications or career movement—it helps you understand the path, skills, and development that support future roles.
Learning Hub
The Learning experience helps you find courses aligned to job families, sub-families, and skills, making it easier to discover relevant learning across the organization.
In Learning, you can:
- Browse courses by job family and sub-family
- See the skills associated with courses
- Search by topic, skill, keyword, or interest
- Find learning aligned to your role or areas you want to develop
Learning is designed for discovery and access. It helps you quickly find relevant courses and understand how learning connects to skills and roles—supporting intentional development and growth.